The truthmaker theory rests on the thesis that the link between a true judgment and that in the world to which it corresponds is not a one-to-one but rather a one-to-many relation. An analogous thesis in relation to the link between a singular term and that in the world to which it refers is already widely accepted. This is the thesis to the effect that singular reference is marked by vagueness of a sort that is best understood in supervaluationist terms. (...) In what follows we show that the supervaluationist approach to singular reference, when wedded to the truthmaker idea, yields a framework of surprising power, which offers a uniform set of solutions to a range of problems regarding identity, reference and knowledge, problems which have hitherto been dealt with on an ad hoc basis. (shrink)

The structuralist conception of metaphysics holds that it aims to uncover the ultimate structure of reality and explain how the world's richness and variety are accounted for by that ultimate structure. On this conception, metaphysicians produce fundamental theories, the primitive, undefined expressions of which are supposed to 'carve reality at its joints', as it were. On this conception, ontological questions are understood as questions about what there is, where the existential quantifier 'there is' has a fundamental, joint-carving interpretation. Structuralist orthodoxy (...) holds that there is exactly one fundamental, joint-carving interpretation that an existential quantifier could have. This orthodox assumption could go wrong--either by there being too few fundamental-quantifier interpretations, or by there being too many. In this dissertation I examine the implications of these non-orthodox options. Someone who thinks there are too many fundamental-quantifier interpretations might think this means standard ontological debates are in some sense defective of 'merely verbal', or she might think instead that the different quantifiers show that there are different 'ways' or 'modes' of being. I argue that the first option runs into problems with a certain sort of realism about logic, but that there is no general problem with the second option, despite its longstanding bad philosophical reputation. I also argue that realism about logic gives us reason to think the dispute between someone who thinks there are many 'modes of being' in this sense and someone who thinks there is just one is not itself verbal. Finally, I turn to the case in which there are no fundamental quantifiers, arguing that it brings with it a host of theoretical problems we could avoid with quantifiers. (shrink)

Husserlian Essentialism is the view, maintained byEdmundHusserl throughout his career, that necessary truths obtain because essentialist truths obtain. In this thesis I have two goals. First, to reconstruct and flesh out Husserlian Essentialism and its connections with surrounding areas of Husserl's philosophy in full detail – something which has not been done yet. Second, to assess the theoretical solidity of the view. As regards the second point, after having presented Husserlian Essentialism in the first two chapters, I raise a serious (...) problem for it in Chapter 3. In the remainder of the thesis I endeavour to solve the problem. In order to do so, I propose to amend both Husserl's theory of essence and his theory of predication. The bulk of the emendation consists in working out an account of essence and an account of predication that do not presuppose, or in any way imply, the claims that: 1) for a universal to be in the essence of an object, either the object or one of its parts must instantiate the universal; 2) for a universal to be truly predicated of an object, either the object or one of its parts must instantiate the universal. These claims, notice, apart from being what gets Husserl in trouble, are well entrenched not only in Husserl's, but in most theories of essence and predication. It is thus interesting to see what an alternative option may be – even regardless of the Husserlian setting in which I work it out. (shrink)

The distinction between telic and atelic predicates has been described in terms of the algebraic properties of their meaning since the early days of model-theoretic semantics. This perspective was inspired by Aristotle’s discussion of types of actions that do or do not take time to be completed1 which was taken up and turned into a linguistic discussion of action-denoting predicates by Vendler (1957). The algebraic notion that seemed to be most conducive to express the Aristotelian distinction appeared to be the (...) mereological notion of a part, applied to the time at which these predicates hold: atelic predicates, like push a cart, have the subinterval property, that is, whenever they are true at a time interval, then they are true at any part of that interval; this does not hold for telic predicates, like eat an apple, cf. Bennett & Partee (1972), Taylor (1977), and Dowty (1979)2. Bach (1986) integrated these insights into a semantics based on events. (shrink)

There are famously two main metaphysics of persistence, namely three and four-dimensionalism. Both yield a particular solution to the so called puzzle of change. I argue that typical three-dimensionalist solutions to the puzzle face insurmountable difficulties even in the simplest relativistic setting, that of Minkowski spacetime.

A critical survey of the fundamental philosophical issues in the logic and formal ontology of space, with special emphasis on the interplay between mereology (the theory of parthood relations), topology (broadly understood as a theory of qualitative spatial relations such as continuity and contiguity), and the theory of spatial location proper.

The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate that metaphysics is a necessary discipline -- necessary in the sense that all areas of philosophy, all areas of science, and in fact any type of rational activity at all would be impossible without a metaphysical background or metaphysical presuppositions. Because of the extremely strong nature of this claim, it is not possible to put forward a very simple argument, although I will attempt to construct one. A crucial issue here is what (...) metaphysics in fact is -- the nature of metaphysics. The conception of metaphysics which I support could be called Aristotelian, as opposed to Kantian: metaphysics is the first philosophy and the basis of all other philosophical and scientific inquiry. I will argue that this is indeed the most plausible conception of metaphysics. (shrink)

Quine claimed that to be is is to be a value of a bound variable. In the paper we assume that this claim contains an important philosophical insight and investigate its background. It is argued that there are two dimensions involved in Quine’s slogan: (i) the distinction between existing and non-existing objects and (ii) the question of the systematic ambiguity of being that can be traced back to Aristotle. At the first sight it is tempting to construe Quine’s criterion according (...) to the first dimension. In this light it appears as an anti-Meinongian device and the Russelian roots of Quine’s philosophy make this interpretation prima facie plausible. However, it is argued that it is the anti-Aristotelian line which is dominant in Quine’s philosophy, and which is ontologically much more interesting. (shrink)

The paper is a contribution to formal ontology. It seeks to use topological means in order to derive ontological laws pertaining to the boundaries and interiors of wholes, to relations of contact and connectedness, to the concepts of surface, point, neighbourhood, and so on. The basis of the theory is mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, a theory which is shown to have a number of advantages, for ontological purposes, over standard treatments of topology in set-theoretic terms. One (...) central goal of the paper is to provide a rigorous formulation of Brentano's thesis to the effect that a boundary can exist as a matter of necessity only as part of a whole of higher dimension which it is the boundary of. It concludes with a brief survey of current applications of mereotopology in areas such as natural-language analysis, geographic information systems, machine vision, naive physics, and database and knowledge engineering. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to examine how any domain of Meinongian objects can be structured by a special kind of mereology. The basic definition of this mereology is the following: an object is part of another iff every characteristic property of the former is also a characteristic property of the latter. I will show that this kind of mereology ends up being very powerful for dealing with Meinongian objects. Mereological sums and products are not restricted in any way (...) in a domain of Meinongian objects: there is a sum and a product for any pair of Meinongian objects. With the mereological operations of sum, product and complement, and two special Meinongian objects, we can define a full boolean algebra on Meinongian objects. Moreover, this kind of mereology is atomic and extensional: an atom is a Meinongian object having just one characteristic property and two objects are identical iff the same atoms are parts of both of them. A Meinongian object can finally be defined in mereological terms as the sum of the atoms of its characteristic properties. (shrink)

Many friends of the category of particularised qualities subscribe to the view that particularised qualities have a unique bearer in which they inhere; no such quality then can inhere in two different entities. But it seems that this idea is flawed, for there are apparent counterexamples. An apple’s redness is identical with the redness of its skin, though the apple is distinct from its skin. So it seems that a principle of beareruniqueness has to be modified, maybe by excluding certain (...) unwanted cases. (shrink)

W dziełach Arystotelesa, lub z medievals, jak również w pismach późniejszych zdroworozsądkowe filozofów, takich jak Thomas Reid czy GE Moore’a, możemy znaleźć rodzinę różnych prób uporania się ze strukturami rozsądku i wspólnego -sense świat, który jest nam dany w normalnym, doświadczenie pre-teoretycznym. Będziemy argumentować, co wynika, że ​​teoria takich struktur stanowi ważny i dotychczas niedoceniany związek między wczesnym psychologii Gestalt z jednej strony, oraz współczesnych osiągnięć w filozofii i sztucznej inteligencji badań na innych.

So selbstverständlich es klingt, vom Geist, der Psyche oder auch der Seele eines Menschen zu reden, und so vertraut uns wissenschaftliche Disziplinen sind, die sich philosophisch oder empirisch damit beschäftigen, so schwer fällt es, ein einheitliches Merkmale dafür anzugeben, wann etwas ein psychisches Phänomen ist. Viele der potentiellen Merkmale decken eben nur einen Teil des Spektrums dessen ab, was wir gewöhnlich als psychisch bezeichnen würden, und sind damit bestenfalls hinreichende, aber sicher keine notwendigen Bedingungen des Psychischen. Im Mittelpunkt des folgenden (...) Artikels wird dagegen ein Merkmal stehen, von dem feststeht, daß es nicht hinreichend ist, von dem man aber vermuten kann, es sei zumindest notwendig: die Individualität psychischer Phänomene. Die Frage, mit der ich mich beschäftigen werde, ist, ob sich diese Vermutung mit Bezug auf eine Grnppe paradigmatisch psychischer Phänomene aufrecht erhalten läßt, die intentionalen Einstellungen. (shrink)

Some of the forerunners of quantum theory regarded the basic entities of such theories as 'non-individuals'. One of the problems is to treat collections of such 'things', for they do not obey the axioms of standard set theories like Zermelo- Fraenkel. In this paper, collections of objects to which the standard concept of identity does not apply are termed 'quasi-sets'. The motivation for such a theory, linked to what we call 'the Manin problem', is presented, so as its specific axioms. (...) At the end, it is shown how quantum statistics can be obtained within quasi-set thbeory. (shrink)

Some would conceive philosophy as being divided into Analytic and Continental. This, as John Searle points out, is rather like conceiving America as being divided into Business and Kansas. Searle’s wise saying has not, as yet, received the theoretical attention it deserves. In both cases we have a certain domain, which is conceived as being divided into two parts, one defined in spatial terms, the other defined in terms of objects, practices or features widely spread through some spatial area. We (...) present a draft theory of such divides, and of the agglomerations (populations, movements, systems of beliefs) which are the vehicles for their division. It offers a general, ontological theory of Us and Them, of Analytics and Continentals, of the Hegemonic Colonizing Self and the Indigenous Colonized Other. -/- Presented at a conference on Bridging the Analytic-Continental Divide, Tel Aviv University, January 17-20, 1999. (shrink)

An overview of the way I picture the amorphous world we live in, built around my comments and responses to nine festschrift essays by A. Borghini (on the Fedro metaphor and the art of butchery), F. Calemi (on the predication principle and metalinguistic nominalism), C. Calosi (on the argument from mereological universalism to extensonality), E. Casetta (on the role of “monsters” in the realism/antirealism debate), V. Giardino (on inductive reasoning, spatial representation, and problem solving), P. Graziani (on mereological notation), P. (...) Pedrini (on the distinction between natural and artificial boundaries), D. Santoro (on causation by omission), and G. Torrengo (on absolute vs. relational space and the problem of incongruent counterparts). (shrink)

Numerical identity is the non-relational sameness of an object to itself. It is concerned with understanding how entities undergo change and maintain their identity. In substance metaphysics, an entity is considered a substance with an essence and such an essence is the source of its power. However, such a framework fails to explain the sense in which an entity is still the entity it was, amidst changes. Those who claim that essence is unaffected by existence are faced with challenge of (...) exploring the epistemic access to such an essence, which is questionable at best. Process metaphysics is a strong candidate for a theory that can ontologically explain regularity and change without appeal to essence. Process and its interactions is the main category. Every process is an emergent organization of constitutive interactions and is individuated on the basis of its interactive powers, that is, the ways in which it interacts with the world around it. Interactions are situated adaptation to changes. In this way, changes are crucial within process metaphysics and are included in the starting point of its investigation. What seems to the naked eyes as one-ness/singularity is a complex process where an organization of interactions is emerging from moment to moment by continually adapting to the changes around and within it. The question of numerical identity over time becomes valid only within substance metaphysics which has no space to accommodate change, due to its allegiance to essence. (shrink)